Ato Kwamena on the Racist side

Ato Kwamena Dadze wrote a piece on Joy FM website in which totally side with Fredrick John Dealtry Lugard, a 1900 racist who liken Africans, their religion and culture to animals. The annoying aspect of Atos’s piece was that he threw a very insulting quote from Lugard’s book on his reader’s face and essentially agreed with Lugard’s Neanderthal argument without any justification.

“Lord Lugard sounds very insulting, doesn't he?” Ato Kwamena asked. “The fact, though, is that he is dead right on almost all counts,”

Ato, on what count is Lugard right? Is he right that you and your ancestors are backward and closer to animals than humans? Did Joy FM and its management agree that we Africans are to quote Lugard, “far nearer to the animal world than that of the European or Asiatic, and exhibits something of the animals’ placidity”? To what extent are we less humans than the Europeans are?

Fellows readers, Ato and others are the very reasons why Africa is still under develop. Suffice it to say that if we have people like Ato in positions of authority they will never fight for our cultures and traditions and will work with the white man to undermine it.

It was precisely because of the white man’s thought that we are animals that they think they can enslave our ancestors, colonize our people, and change us to Christianity at the barrel of the gun so that they can change us, African, into more human and less animal. It is important to state that the very ship that carried the slave masters to our shores also brought the Christian missionaries.

A missionary that kept pumping the ideas such as those that Lugard authored, suptly into the ears of our Africans, and as time progresses they either accept idea openly or silently promote it as Ato has just did on Joy FM’s websit. To the extent that some black Africans will think that those missionaries are right, and millions of years of our cultures and traditions are actually wrong is troubling. Instead of devoting resources using the traditions of our people as a yardstick for development, we swallow the white man’s thought hook-line-sinker.

Unfortunately, the white man has the likes of Ato to do their bidding for them, throwing dust into the eyes of our people and making them think that we are sub humans.

But fortunately, the white man’s project was not all that successful, whiles they may have succeeded in changing folks like Ato into accepting their views. Knowledge has disproven that shone age thought wrong. Science from sociology to genetics has shown that human development has nothing to do with race.

All humans, whether Black, White or Asian exhibit the same characteristics, we have brains more sophisticated than animal, we walk on two legs, we create tools, we talk and share ideas, and as a result we influence our environment. Ato ancestors perhaps know how to manufacture their farming tools before the advent of the white man on Ghanaian shores. They shared ideas on what works and what does not. These characteristics are what make us humans and not the colour of the skin.

This explains why if you free a Ghanaian village boy from Kotwea in the Ashanti Region on European or North American soil, he will not ran for the wild like the animals would. He would mix with other humans, giving the opportunity, he would find himself a job, and even go school or a learn trade like a full fledge human.

If we agree with the overwhelming scientific evidence from palaeontology to the recent genetic studies conducted by Spencer Wills and others, all human originated from Africa. Therefore, in all human’s living on earth today is some form of “Africanness.”

In conclusion, it is fair say that Ato and his like are those that exhibit the placidity of animals because, like a dog, they allowed themselves to be tamed by the White race. They think and accept the notion they are like animals to their own detriment. Our ancestors, however, rejected that notion in their fight against slavery, colonization and African traditional genocide.

Abdul Sidibe

Calgary, Alberta, Ghana

agolumusah@yahoo.com or 403-922-4091